Michel Foucault. What is

Enlightenment?

What is Enlightenment? in Rabinow (P.), éd., The Foucault Reader, New York,

Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.

Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect

opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not

much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred

to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know

whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more

entertaining.

In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical,

Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung ?

And the respondent was Kant.

A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the

history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of

answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been

repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or

Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront

this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the

Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and

what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and

that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we

could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to

answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?

Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for several reasons.

1. To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same

journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn's text

when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical

movement with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this

precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or

so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of

making a place for Jewish culture within German thought -- which Lessing

had tried to do in Die Juden -- or else of identifying problems common to

Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done

in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts

published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the

Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are

seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is

perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny -- we now

know to what drama that was to lead.

2. But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text poses

a new problem.

It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to

reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this

reflection had until then taken three main forms.

o The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the

world, distinct from the others through some inherent characteristics,

or separated from the others by some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato's

Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those

revolutions of the world in which the world is turning backwards, with

all the negative consequences that may ensue.

o The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the

heralding signs of a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a

kind of historical hermeneutics of which Augustine might provide an

example.

o The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the

dawning of a new world. That is what Vico describes in the last

chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what he sees 'today' is 'a complete

humanity ... spread abroad through all nations, for a few great

monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is also 'Europe ... radiant

with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for

the happiness of human life.' [1]

Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is

neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are

perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in

an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In his

other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or defines

the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklärung, he

deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to

understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He

is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect

to yesterday ?

3. I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very

clear despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features

that seem to me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the

philosophical question of the present day.

Kant indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is

a process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,'

he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's

authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives

three examples: we are in a state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place

of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our

conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in

passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even

though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is

defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority,

and the use of reason.

We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather

ambiguous manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process;

but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first

paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status.

Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a

change that he himself will bring about in himself. Significantly, Kant says

that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic

device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and it is

also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others.

What, then, is this instruction ? Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage,

the audacity, to know.' Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a

process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be

accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single

process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in

it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary

actors.

A third difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word "mankind",

Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history

is well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in

the process of Enlightenment ? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment

as a historical change that affects the political and social existence of all

people on the face of the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a

change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings ? But the

question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant's answer

is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of

simplicity, it is rather complex.

Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from

its immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional,

ethical and political.

The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the

use of reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature

status, Kant invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders';

such is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political

power, and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach

maturity when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: 'Obey,

and you will be able to reason as much as you like.' We must note that the

German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used in the

Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in

which reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for

reasoning's sake. And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in

appearance: paying one's taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes

about the system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or

again, taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while

reasoning freely about religious dogmas.

We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been

meant, since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think

as one pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings

into play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he

introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at

once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its

private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called

freedom of conscience.

But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this

private use of reason ? In what area is it exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a

private use of reason when he is 'a cog in a machine'; that is, when he has a

role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to

be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a

particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a

circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue

particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish

obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these

determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular

ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.

On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason,

when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine),

when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of

reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process

by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought

guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the

public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.

Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can

readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the

business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how

the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through

the absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be

assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general

process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation

prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political problem. The question,

in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form

that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight,

while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant, in

conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of

contract -- what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free

reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best

guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that

must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.

Let us leave Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable

of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think,

could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural

transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give

it an exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the

connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact

describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason

to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment

that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under

which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what

must be done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise

to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the

legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy

can be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up

in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.

It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant's and

the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the

internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving.

Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity's passage to its

adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and

its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each

individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.

The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the

crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on

the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a

philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment.

But it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way,

closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a

reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is

writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on 'today' as

difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty

of this text appears to me to lie.

And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of

departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.

I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features

characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or

less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling

'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the

sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a

rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.

Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity

rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of

relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the

end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and

the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no

doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to

distinguish the 'modern era' from the 'premodern' or 'postmodern,' I think it would be

more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation,

has found itself struggling with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'

To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable

example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely

recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.

1. Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity

of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of

the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying

when he defines modernity as 'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' [2]

But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this

perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with

respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in

recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor

behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no

more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that

makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment. Modernity

is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to

'heroize' the present .

I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his

contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding

nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient

togas. But modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in

introducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who

can show the dark frock-coat as 'the necessary costume of our time,' the one

who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential,

permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. 'The

dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an

expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an

expression of the public soul -- an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes

(mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us

celebrating some funeral.' [3] To designate this attitude of modernity,

Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is highly significant because it is

presented in the form of a precept: 'You have no right to despise the present.'

2. This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not

treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it.

It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity.

That would be what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The flâneur,

the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention

and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur,

Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying,

searching .... Be very sure that this man ... -- this solitary, gifted with an active

imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert -- has an

aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other

than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which

you must allow me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business to extract

from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.' As an

example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In

appearance a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the last to linger

wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a

chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural

man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever

the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.' [4]

But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him

the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the

whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that

world. His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult

interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom;

'natural' things become 'more than natural,' 'beautiful' things become 'more

than beautiful,' and individual objects appear 'endowed with an impulsive life

like the soul of their creator.' [5] For the attitude of modernity, the high value

of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to

imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by

grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which

extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty

that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.

3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the

present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself.

The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To

be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments;

it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what

Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not

recall in detail the well-known passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile nature'; on

man's indispensable revolt against himself; on the 'doctrine of elegance' which

imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples' a discipline more despotic

than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the

dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very

existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes

off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who

tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being';

it compels him to face the task of producing himself.

4. Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this

transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self --

Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in

the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place,

which Baudelaire calls art.

I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical

event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude

of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.

I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of

philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to

the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an

autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been

seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not

faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude

-- that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of

our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.

A. Negatively

1. This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the

Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic,

social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part,

constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise

for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct

relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider.

I think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to Kant's text, that it

defined a certain manner of philosophizing.

But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It

even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself

in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the

Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is

considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a

reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from

its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad).

And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing 'dialectical'

nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may

have been in the Enlightenment.

We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are

historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an

analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible;

and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the 'essential

kernel of rationality' that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would

have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the

'contemporary limits of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not or is no

longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.

2. This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile

confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.

We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and

complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the

development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social

transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of

rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are

very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain

important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been

at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the

mode of reflective relation to the present.

Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of

themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European

societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied

greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved.

Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the

seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of

Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed

to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century

there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and

another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has

been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time

when people supported the humanistic values represented by National

Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.

From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with

humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too

supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a

fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has

always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from

religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the

conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.

Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and

which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a

critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a

principle that is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the

Enlightenment has of itself. From this standpoint I am inclined to see

Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather than identity.

In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems

historically inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the

humanist was important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I

believe because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is

worthwhile too to note that throughout the nineteenth century the

historiography of sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for

people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always distinct from and

sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century.

The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to

confuse them.

In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual

blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the

historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the

question of the Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the

course of the last two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important

one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we

have of ourselves and of our past.

B. Positively

Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more

positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what

we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.

1. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not

talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the

outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed

consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question

was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it

seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a

positive one: in what is given lo us as universal necessary obligatory what

place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and the product of

arbitrary constraints ? The point in brief is to transform the critique conducted

in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form

of a possible transgression.

This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be

practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as

a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves

and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying.

In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of

making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and

archaeological in its method. Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the

sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge

or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse

that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And

this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the

form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will

separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the

possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It

is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a

science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the

undefined work of freedom.

2. But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it

seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental

one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one

hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the

test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change

is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should

take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from

all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience

that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to

produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking,

another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the

most dangerous traditions.

I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the

last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being

and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in

which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial

transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis

and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst

political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.

I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical

ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go

beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free

beings.

3. Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit

ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run

the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which

we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control ?

To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding

to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive

knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of

view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of

the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus

we are always in the position of beginning again .

But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and

contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its

homogeneity, and its stakes.

(a) Its Stakes

These are indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of

capacity and power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the

eighteenth century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous

and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And,

moreover, we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it

is perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located --

such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so

universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of

capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements.

Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of

autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And

we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by

various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic

aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of

communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of

normalization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of

society or of population zones, are examples. What is at stake, then, is this:

How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of

power relations ?

(b) Homogeneity

This leads to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are

taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men

give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their

knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms

of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the

technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these

practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game,

up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices).

The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this

realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.

(c) Systematicity

These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over

things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not

mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is

well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and

relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice

versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections

have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of

ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an

open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries

which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all

address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as

subjects of our own knowledge ? How are we constituted as subjects who

exercise or submit to power relations ? How are we constituted as moral

subjects of our own actions ?

(d) Generality

Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense

that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined

practices and discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies

from which we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have

continued to recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship

between sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the

problem of the role of sexual relations; and so on.

But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be

retraced in its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have

to be pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it,

the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in

it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a

certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of

relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what is

neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus the

way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form.

A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.

I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our

experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us

mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a

meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves

which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's

reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or

effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be

considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of

knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a

philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the

historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the

possibility of going beyond them.

This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries.

These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and

genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of

rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in

the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our

relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their

practical coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical

reflection to the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today

that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this

task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience

for liberty.

Notes:

[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H.

Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372.

[2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon,

1964), p. 13.

[3] Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' in The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan

Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.

[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.

[5] Ibid., p. 12.